Lauren Bateman breaks down up strums into a simple exercise: start with four down strums, notice your hand already lifts between them, then add up strums on the offbeats. Slow it down, exaggerate the motion, then tighten it back up. She recommends a Max Grip Dunlop pick.
Eighth notes — the upbeat, called “the ands”.
Max Grip by Dunlop.
G chord.
Are you struggling with your up strum? Is your timing off? Do you hate doing up strums? You can do down strums, but those up strums just sound so awkward. Well, in this lesson, we're going to go over ways to develop the upstrom on your guitar.
So I've got hundreds of thousands of students all over the world, and you guys leave comments below, and I read them. I read all those comments, and very often I get asked, lauren, how do I work on my upstroms? I feel like I'm a robot. Like a jerky robot trying to do these up strums. I can do down strums. So first, let's talk about up strums in context of the down strum. Since most people can do down strums very well, I will usually start students off with a very simple rhythm. It's just four beats, four downs.
One, two, three, four.
Okay, it'll start like this.
One, two, three, Four.
And I'm just playing a G chord.
One, two, three, 4. One, two, three, FOUR.
And I would say 90 to 95% of my students have no problem doing four down strums in a row while holding a single chord. They're like, okay, this is great. Then we're like, all right, let's try and throw in an up strum. So we've got. Let's do something like 1, 2, 3, and 4. And all of a sudden we go.
1, 2, 3, and four.
But instead, it looks like this.
1, 2, 3.
There's like, this rush to get back up. So. So I want you guys to go back to the down strums here, and I want to show you something that you might not be aware of. Now, if we go back to that very simple rhythm, I want you to watch my strumming hand. All right? Don't worry about my counting or what I'm doing. Just watch my strumming hand when I do these four down strums. Ready?
1, 2, 3, 4.
What happens between each one of those down strums? Watch again. Ready?
Did you notice that in order for me to get to the next down strum, my hand had to come up, Right? Every time I went down, my hand had to come up. Well, guess what, guys? I hate to break it to you, but you're already doing up strums. You're just not hitting the strings. So you're actually. You have a natural up strum. You're just not focusing on it. As soon as you focus on the upstrom, you. You're starting to over focus. And you're causing your muscles to stiffen and jerk because you're like, oh, my God, I'm down here. I need to get back up. I'm down here. I need to get back up. So we're going to work on relaxing those up strums into the mix here. So usually what I'll do with students, like I said, we got the down strums, okay? And we're going to go slow. When you're ever. You're trying to develop something on guitar, you have to start slow. So all we're going to do is we're going to take that simple rhythm.
1, 2, 3, 4.
And all we're going to do is we're going to introduce an up strum between each one of those down strums, and we're going to go very slow. Okay? Those are. They're called eighth notes, if you want to know. And they are called the upbeat. They're called the ands.
1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and.
Okay, so it'll sound like this.
It's going to be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and.
Okay. And what I tell students to do. Breathe. Okay, Relax. And in the beginning, I want you to. I do want you to over exaggerate that up strum.
Okay? See how high I'm bringing my hand up? I'm just letting it swing. And you can do this without a count. I'm not. I mean, I have a tempo, but just watch my hand. See, I'm just. Even if you didn't hit the strings, just do this with your hand, okay? Let it swing. This is all your hand is doing on eighth notes. It's just swinging down for a down strum, up for an up strum. All right, so let's try and tighten it up. We're going to do down, up, down.
Up, down, up, down, up.
Okay? And if you feel yourself doing this, relax. Relax the up strum up. Don't force the up. Relax the up strum up. Okay?
1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
And see, if you go nice and slow, you give your brain time to think and relax. Okay, Here it is. Okay, now let's try and tighten it up a little bit. So let's not over exaggerate it so much. Okay?
One and two.
And.
Now if you're still feeling that. That little jerkiness. Come in. Breathe, Relax. Loosen the grip up on the pick. Okay? Loosen the grip up on the pick. And if you're someone who feels like your pick falls out of your hand a lot, you can get these Max Grip picks. They almost feel like they have like sandpaper on them. They're called Max Grip by Dunlop. They're really great picks. This pick is not going to fall out of your hand, but you can definitely loosen up the grip grip without feeling like it's going to fall out of your hand. Okay, so that's it. That's all we're going to do. We're just gent relaxing. So let's go back to that first strumming pattern now.
1, 2, 3 and 4. 1, 2, 3 and four.
Relax the up.
1, 2, 3 and Four.
Again.
One more time.
If you guys practice with this, you will definitely master your up strums on your guitar. And if you're interested in learning more about strumming, I have a whole 7 level guitar system that goes step by step from being an absolute beginner to kind of like the late beginner intermediate stage of playing guitar. So if you're looking for a more step by step way to learn the guitar, I'll put a link in the description below. You guys can go check that out. YouTube's gonna pop up a couple more videos over here if you're interested in those. Click on one and I hope to see you guys in another lesson video real soon.
